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A quick plug: last night’s episode of The Daily Show was one of the best episodes they’ve done in some time.  I encourage you to stick it out until the second segment, which is easily the best segment of the evening.  I look forward to seeing what Jon & Co. have to say tonight about Sarah Palin’s speech.

Good news, gang: a short humor story I wrote recently, called “Short Story Outline,” has been published online by The Battered Suitcase, an online literary magazine from Vagabondage Press, LLC. You can read it by clicking here — the image linked above will take you to the magazine’s main page. The Battered Suitcase is also available as a PDF.

The Phillies and Mets kicked off a brief series last night right here in Philadelphia. Just like last time, it was a wild one. And just like last time, the Phils came out on top. I won’t brag, since the Phils wound up dropping the next two games after that big win the last time these teams met in New York.

I will brag about what a great baseball game it was. It was sour to start, with the Phils going down 7 early, and it would have been sour if they wound up losing after answering with 7 runs of their own (the tying run coming with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth), but it was sweet the rest of the way. The pitching was phenomenal at times, as was the defense. Even a guy like Rudy Seanez, who has been riding the pine a lot recently, came in and pitched a clean inning.

If “Phils score 8 unanswered runs in 13 innings” doesn’t tell you enough about how wild this game was, I’ve uploaded the box score to the site. You can view it by clicking here, or through the photo at right. I’d love to see the scorecard of anyone keeping score last night. Must be a beauty.

I knew this was happening, but the actual release snuck up on me: the new Writers House web site has been rolled out, save for a few remaining pages. It’s far enough along that I have no qualms posting about it, for what that’s worth. If you recognize some of the header photos, it’s for good reason — I snapped some of ‘em (as previously mentioned)!

I hope you’ll take a look around. If you’re a Penn alum, perhaps you’ll even stumble upon a book group — or book group leader! — that piques your interest.

I saw the three big comedies of August this past week, and will be throwing up a post about each. You’ll just have to hold your breath and wait to see if I consider House Bunny one of the three big comedies of August.

As you likely gathered from the photo, I’ll start with Tropic Thunder. It’s been a while since Ben Stiller has been relevant — aside from small roles in Arrested Development and Anchorman, Dodgeball was his last good film. And even that, while funny, lacked the edge that comedy people came to admire in Stiller.

So, you will be glad to know that Tropic Thunder is something along the lines of a return to form for the actor, who also writes and directs (his first writer/director billing since 2001’s Zoolander). Like his best efforts, this is a comedy with something on its mind — specifically, about people choose to identify themselves privately and publicly. What better way to write about the topic than by writing a movie about actors.

Here’s an article from Devin Faraci about that very topic. He nails the big problem of the film — despite its edge, it becomes entirely too conventional in the end as the plot gets in the way. More important, like far too many comedies, it has no interest in punishing any of its characters — this, it seems, is the key difference between the 2008 Stiller who directed Tropic Thunder and the 1996 Stiller who directed The Cable Guy. In that film, he had no problems splaying his title character across a satellite dish. In Tropic Thunder, he’s too quick to save the characters he’s spent the past two hours plunging into their own personal hells.

I watched The Line today after being tipped off to it at CHUD.  While certainly not a major work, it’s definitely funny — seven four-minute episodes about nerds lining up for the first showing of a beloved science fiction movie. The shows or sketches or bits — whatever you want to call them — star Bill Hader, Joe Lo Truglio, Jason Sudeikis and Paul Scheer, among others.

I’m embedding the first episode below the jump. You can view the rest at Hulu.

[Read more]

My dad scored some pretty sweet seats for this past Tuesday’s Phillies game. The game was Jimmy Rollins’ first at home since his “frontrunner” comments. The crowd was loud during his first at-bat, a healthy mix of boos and cheers. The bloggers at We Should Be GMs were at the game distributing fliers for their “Campaign Cheer” program, which urged Philly fans to cheer not just for Rollins, but for the entire team, no matter what happened. For the record, I did cheer for Rollins! Didn’t help, though — the guy had a brutal night.

The Phils, though, won the game by a score of 5-4. Above, you can see Jayson Werth running right at me — I told you the seats were good — after hitting the home run that put the Phils ahead for good. I took a ton of photos at the game, which you can see by clicking the photo above, or here.

“Notice”

Hey
ya’ll

I’m probably
just gonna
save the
good
bad
stuff
for one hundred.

(in honor of milestones)

“Poetry 2.0″

It’s a
poem
But with
shitty
social networking.

It’s the future,
dude.

(in honor of Poetry 1.0)

“Poem for Politics”

Barack the vote?
Taken

Barack and Roll?
Taken

McCain is able?
Taken

Barr Barr Barr Barr Barr’s yr man?
There we go

(in memory of discourse)